Bystander At The Switch (Updated)

The Moral Case Against Mandatory Public Health Measures

(Quick link to my full article at the Ideas Institute)

We are reaching the frothy top of a two-year war on our individual liberties. Today Prime Minister Trudeau announced that “everything is on the table”… against peaceful citizens demanding the restoration of our constitutionally-guaranteed rights.

The regime has given itself nothing less than the arbitrary authority to strip individuals of their bodily autonomy and to knowingly sacrifice one group of people with the goal of benefiting another. If we allow this violation of our rights to stand, we are turning our backs on 250 years of liberal democracy and returning to a feudal world of conditional rights and absolute power. A world of masters and serfs.

To bring the moral principle at the heart of this war to the foreground, the newly minted Canadian think tank, The Ideas Institute, has asked me to republish an updated version of my extremely popular article: Bystander at the Switch (updated): The Moral Case Against Mandatory Public Health Measures.

From the Battle of Normandy during WWII to the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan, Canadian soldiers have bled and died to defend this existential moral principle for other people all around the world. Every Canadian police officer is sworn to protect that principle when they take their oath and pick up their badge. It is the essense of what it means to be a free people. Yet today, our government has turned against its own citizens as it systematically grinds that moral principle into the dust.

I hope this article will bring some much needed clarity about what is at stake in this war. So, here is the introduction to “The Bystander at the Switch” - please send it to everyone still on the wrong side of this moral issue. It is time to rally together and stand on guard for what makes Canada our home.

Do you remember the moral riddle taught in grade school called the "Bystander at the Switch" (also known as the Trolley Problem)? It was a story about a runaway train hurtling towards a cluster of people stuck on the tracks ahead. But you have the option to pull the switch and send the train down another track with a smaller number of people on it. You have the option of saving some lives by sacrificing a smaller number of others. Do you pull the switch?

In grade school the riddle was posed as a moral dilemma. But it's not. There was only ever one correct choice. We invented universal human rights to make it clear that no person or government has the right to pull the switch to send the train down another track towards a sacrificial group of victims. 

In December of 1948, in the aftermath of the human rights violations committed during the Second World War, the member states of the United Nations formally adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It explicitly forbids…

Continue reading this article at the Ideas Institute: